


That Sweet Voice Flavor, Bro

by rattyknive



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Benrey uses he/they pronouns bc I say so, Benrey-centric, Bubby is there and you’ll see why, M/M, More tags to be added, Slow Burn, They/Themrey, Tommy and Benrey are friends already
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25376506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattyknive/pseuds/rattyknive
Summary: Benrey is a guard at Black Mesa who takes great pride in being funny. It makes him feel good about himself, even if he can’t remember his last name or what he was before he was a guard. At least he had Tommy and Bubby and Coomer to talk to. And now a new face, some dipshit in an orange suit down the hall.
Relationships: Benrey & Bubby (Half-Life), Benrey/Gordon Freeman, Benrey/Gordon Freeman/Tommy Coolatta, Benrey/Tommy Coolatta
Comments: 11
Kudos: 130





	1. Pre-Feetman

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably just going to be drabbles unless I decide to flesh out actual chapters, we’ll see

Time doesn’t apply to you when you’re a guard at Black Mesa. Or at least, that’s how it felt to Benrey. Standing in front of a door a few feet away from another guard who refused to man up and just fucking _chat_ with him, the hours slipping idly away through his twitchy, clawed fingers. He doesn’t know the hours of the day or night until the little radio on the chest of the other guard crackles to life- only three times a day, Benrey notes and then forgets again- signaling a break in the morning, lunch, and then the hour where everyone ‘clocks out.’ He still doesn’t know what that means. All he knows is that when the other guards disappear and the lights go out in the halls, he’s free to roam wherever he wants so long as he isn’t caught.

Sometimes he watches a scientist grumble away at a desk, dimly lit by a reading lamp and chewing on some unidentifiable piece of plastic that gives a satisfying crackling sound on occasion. Other times he wanders off to find his friend Tommy, who sleeps in the break room, softly snoring and drooling into the fur of his massive, immortal dog. Benrey wonders briefly if Tommy lives in that room before the thought is gone, wiped from his head once he glances over to the soda machine and silently climbs down from where he was clinging to the roof. His memory has always been shit, and he’s almost sure it’s the work of some scientists he can vaguely remember if he focuses on it, so he doesn’t think about it. As his hand no-clips through the front of the machine to snag a Fanta can, he instead thinks of Tommy and his strange dog. Benrey doesn’t have a preference for dogs or cats, not even knowing what a ‘cat’ is save for the off-handed comment Tommy gave in regards to Benrey’s behavior that one time. He didn’t know whether Tommy had meant it as a compliment or not, but telling Benrey that his eyes were “neon yellow like a warning sign” and “pretty and catlike” seemed like a compliment to him. It takes several tries to pull the can of Fanta out of the vending machine, each try making his hand catch on the glass as the shitty aluminum refused to cooperate with him.

” _Get out,”_ he mumbles, barely above a whisper as he swallows down a frustrated noise. _“Out, please. Cringe-ass can can’t even... comply. Fuck you,”_ a little more under-his-breath swearing occurs before it finally comes free, and he gingerly holds the can only his mouth as he slinks out of the room. Sunkist, vigilant as ever, watches him leave as Tommy sleeps, and he gives them both a little wave. Finding a place hidden from the constant surveillance of Black Mesa is incredibly difficult, but for someone who can change their size at will and see in the dark, it only takes a couple of tries and trashed hideouts to find a good one. It’s a tiny little space between elevators, but that just means he can jury-rig some electrical wiring into the little box tv he had hooked up to an old PlayStation that Tommy managed to find.  
Benrey cracks open the can of Fanta with his teeth, tearing effortlessly through the thin plastic and aluminum to chug it. Orange isn’t his favorite, but it’s preferable to the other flavors in there. Plus it’s the first one he grabbed, and he’s not exactly picky. A couple of restless, cramped hours pass as he plays his games and squints at the tv to make out the graphics, eventually setting down the controller to stretch. He almost never goes to his full size, finding that everyone is significantly more comfortable around him if he isn’t towering over them. So a solid foot of height gets chunked off every day, knocking him down from 6’5 to a ‘bearable’ 5’5, though he still doesn’t get why people are more likely to avoid him if he’s tall. Not that he cares.

It’s another night in a series of long, sleepless nights in the Black Mesa facility. 


	2. Whuh? The fuck is a ‘gender’

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still pre-Gordon bc I crave background development, the next chapter will also be pre-Gordon but the fourth should introduce him

Benrey thinks he’s pretty well acquainted with the other people in Black Mesa, if not for the fact that they’re all a bunch of human and human-adjacent weirdos. Tommy is the most bearable out of all of them, as well as two particular scientists he sees hanging around each other all the time. Doctor Harold Coomer PHD and Professor- no, this one is a Doctor too. Doctor Bubby. Benrey had spent a bit of time with them after Tommy was called away for a small two-week project, just loitering around where the older scientists hung out and chattered away. He learned a few things when he bothered to pay attention, which wasn’t a lot. The scientist named Bubby had previously been held in a tube in the deeper parts of Black Mesa, and that they didn’t particularly have a gender. 

“Whuh?” Benrey says, eloquent as ever after Bubby offhandedly scoffs at the gender binary. “Thought everybody had one. Get ‘signed one when you get spat out the pussy or some shit.” Bubby snorts at that, allowing Benrey half a toothy smirk before their expression shifts back to annoyance. Coomer pipes up from across the room, spouting off the Wikipedia definition of ‘gender,’ and Benrey actually listens for once. As little as Benrey had been educated about the subject, apparently his definition was way outdated. Bubby quietly listens to their husband and observes the guard seated cross-legged about a foot away from them, whose eyes were intently focused on the animated, stocky scientist across the room. 

Tommy comes back after about a week, walking into the room to find Bubby and Benrey grinning and talking at each other. It strikes him how similar they are for a moment, bad posture and grins full of mischief and sharp teeth, cackles almost identical at this point- though Benrey does have a habit of repeating sounds he hears to help him remember what they are. It doesn’t surprise Tommy to find that they both hit it off quite well, but a surprise does come when Benrey asks him to try out different pronouns for a while. He watches from the entrance of the lab with barely held back laughter as Bubby and Benrey share the most awkward side-hug he’s ever seen, offering his hand to Benrey as the guard comes shuffling over to him.

They spend the rest of the day with Sunkist, talking about games they could play together once they get out of Black Mesa. Benrey doesn’t believe that they’ll ever actually get out of Black Mesa, but it doesn’t hurt to indulge Tommy. They can tell that he seems a little down, laying back on Sunkist with a half-empty bottle of Cola in his hand as he gestures about with his other hand, half-heartedly rambling about the fact that they didn’t allow him to stim while he was doing the project with the other scientists. The two of them hug briefly once it’s time for the ‘clock-out,’ and then Benrey leaves to go back to their... well, it’s hard to call it _their_ room as it belongs to Black Mesa, but it’s a space that they occupy and go when they need to be alone, so it’s theirs.   
  
Maybe tomorrow will be more fun for Tommy now that he doesn’t have to be in a shitty project, Benrey thinks, turning on his side and curling his tail (now free from his pants) around his legs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eventually I’ll add a photo or a link to a post about what this version of Benrey looks like dnckdjc


	3. Sweet Voice Study

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tommy finds out that Benrey isn’t exactly human, which means he has to find a way to keep that from getting them killed while also turning in research about them

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mentions of a meltdown on Benrey’s end, and finally getting around to introducing Gordon at the very end! This mostly adheres to canon, but there will still be a few changes later on

Benrey isn’t from Earth. Tommy found this out approximately a year after they had first met, which was the thirty-second underground level where most of the ‘alien’ things are stored and from where Benrey had escaped. Tommy knew about extraterrestrial existences and was even one of the top scientists assigned to the study of strange otherworldly fauna that Black Mesa might have acquired. Benrey, however, seemed to be one of the few sentient species to have been found in Black Mesa, but had escaped the hold that they had been kept in, deciding to live in and observe from inside of the ventilation shafts and walls of the facility. It was hard to pinpoint Benrey’s species once Tommy determined that they were not human, keeping that a secret from his coworkers so that his new friend didn’t get forcibly taken from him, dissected, and/or viciously tested on. It was hard to decipher the thick gamer lingo that they spoke in for a while, since they didn’t communicate with people other than online, but they both eventually found a way to understand each other. The Black Mesa Sweet Voice, as Coomer called it, was the one thing that fascinated Tommy the most about his new friend. At the time of their first meeting, Tommy was an almost fresh-out-of-college scientist, 28 years old with his doctorate tacked up onto his wall. Benrey had only recently figured out how to shift from a formless, multi-eyed mass that could fit into any crevice and crack to a security guard, trying to make their own face as human as they could, but they still had trouble rendering in two eyes, so they cast a shadow over their face to hide it. 

A year after they had first met was when Tommy found out that Benrey wasn’t human. And by that he only meant that he had often thought of and hypothesized about it, but never had an official say for it until Benrey couldn’t hold in their sweet voice any longer. They had held it in through every interaction with Tommy and other scientists so that they wouldn’t be found out, keeping it to themselves in the halls and the bathrooms, not even letting it out in the vents to keep from being tracked- but the force of bundling up and shoving down so much pressure eventually got to them. Tommy found them in the break room on April 7th, 4:32 pm, huddled up in the far corner of the room as the sweet voice spilled from their mouth and melted into the thick film of viscous, swirling color on the ceiling. This gave Tommy all the evidence he needed to prove to himself that Benrey was, in fact, not of Earth, and a reason to file an application for top access in the synthetic biology and Xenobiological fields. 

In the moment, though, Tommy had to get his priorities in order- the first being to keep Benrey out of the prying gaze of the other scientists, the second to comfort them and find a safe place for them to stay while with him in Black Mesa, and the third to request that Benrey be kept secret and be placed solely in Tommy’s care and jurisdiction. As he helped Benrey out of the dimly glowing room, he recounted the number of times he suspected that Benrey might have been of extraterrestrial descent, as well as trying to cross-reference the evidence of what he’d seen beforehand and what he’d seen now to find a way to determine Benrey’s species. By the time that Tommy had half-carried Benrey to his office and locked the door, he’d already planned out how his research was going to go- if he had any way to keep Benrey from being tested on and dissected by other scientists, he would have to turn in his own research. 

The office lights are dimmed so that Benrey can have a darker space to have their meltdown in, letting go of Tommy to curl up in the corner of the room as sweet voice continues to bubble up out of their throat. Tommy gently offers them a chilled water bottle from their mini fridge which is usually stocked with various sodas and small pastries, and they take the bottle and hold it to their chest as more sweet voice comes out. The two of them sit together as sweet voice congeals across the ceiling, a mass of bright, swirling colors that dim and brighten and dim again with the rhythm of Benrey’s breathing. It finally tapers off with a brilliant red, and they slump against the wall with a deep exhale. “What does this all mean, if- if it means anything at all?” Tommy murmurs in a hushed tone, curious. As ‘childish’ as some of his interests and hyperfixation may be, he’s still a scientist. They don’t call him Dr. Coolatta for nothing. “

Mint to vermillion,” Benrey mumbles, carefully unscrewing the cap of the water bottle, “means deep appreciation. Thanks, bro.” 

“It’s not a- it’s no problem at all, Benrey,” Tommy says as gently as he can, standing up to walk to his desk and shuffle through all of the various application papers to find the ones he’ll need. Looking up from the handful of papers splayed out on his desk and twirling his pen between his fingers, he tentatively asks, “Would you- are you okay? I have, I've got snacks? If you need them?” and when Benrey shakes their head, he can’t tell which question is being answered. Most likely the one about snacks, but it’s always hard to tell when one of them goes nonverbal. 

A few hours later, by the time the sweet voice has almost completely dissipated and the ceiling is mostly visible again, Benrey gets up and stretches as Tommy continues to idly pen away at the papers. They pause when they hear the pen stop because Tommy had heard them get up. An awkward pause ensues between the both of them as they attempt to keep eye contact, but Tommy knows that Benrey has trouble maintaining it for too long, so he drops it first to let Benrey do what they were going to do, looking back down at his papers. 

The lights flick back on, a warm yellow light from special light bulbs that Tommy ordered instead of the glaring fluorescents that every other office has. He would let natural light in if they weren’t all so far underground, but he can’t, so strange light bulbs it is. Regardless of that, Tommy’s still glad that Benrey is feeling better, and he looks up to see them sitting on the edge of his desk, fiddling with the straps of their vest. “What’s up? Someth- is something up?” A shrug from Benrey has Tommy sighing, capping his pen and cracking open his fifth can of soda in an hour. He’d just finished the paperwork he needed, which would let him have complete control over whatever assignment Black Mesa might give him in regards to studying Benrey- which meant that no one could argue with him if he said not to dissect them or to let them go wherever they wanted so long as they behaved. Benrey mumbles something that he doesn’t quite catch, standing up to walk around to the front of the desk and sit next to the ‘guard’. “Huh?”

“…hug…?” “Yeah! Hug time.”   


* * *

Eight years of rocky, science-filled and soda-fueled years of residence in Black Mesa. Tommy, a 36-year-old scientist, his 31(?)-year-old partner, the odd, eldritch security guard, and the two married scientists that wrestle and fight and bicker. None of them really know or agree on the true age of Benrey, but they can all agree that he’s younger than Tommy. The youngest of the entire science team until a certain theoretical science major comes into the group one casual October afternoon. 

Fall is a nice season, if Benrey knew anything about seasons down in the mostly sterile levels of Black Mesa. They’d never been to the surface before, having been prohibited by the chief security officer and the head scientists for fear of Benrey’s inevitable escape. But they didn’t really care about escaping anymore. Tommy and Bubby and Coomer are all cool, great friends, and they can play on their PlayStation after hours and drink soda and nap in the break room or under Tommy’s desk. They knew about seasons and weather from Coomer’s informative rambling and the occasional tv show, but they didn’t really have a reason to go and check out the real things. Fiddling with the gun strapped to their leg and daydreaming of the online co-op game with Joshua later that night, Benrey was completely zoned out until he heard someone come walking around the corner from the hallway. The footsteps were heavier than the scientists’ or guards usually were, a quick pace for something sounding so heavy. 

“Hi, howdy. How’s it goin’,” he spoke as he passed them, and Benrey couldn’t help but look up from the floor.  _ It’s not polite to avoid eye contact with someone who is talking to you _ , Coomer had said once, but Benrey’s eyes didn’t make it all the way up to meet the taller man’s. Their eyes caught on a, uh, well. A pretty funny problem, just a little  _ slip _ -up. That’s not workplace appropriate, but how the fuck is a person supposed to just mention that?

“Can I see your, uh, pass port?”

“My what? My  _ passport?” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all of the comments 🥺🥺 I plan on writing a lot more for these chapters which is why this one is twice the size of the previous ones


End file.
